Christian ADV Rider Forum

Quote from: D Patrick on February 03, 2016, 11:05:33 am

Just to prove I finally got my VStrom dirty ... with the help of portabill of course.

Oh?!  You're going to blame it on me? 

Of course, as you know, the comedy is it rained so much after our first few days our bikes looked way too clean for where we'd been ... 

Figured I'd go ahead and post even though this thread is a bit old. :-)

I've been riding for about 40 years, never had the opportunity to have more than one bike at a time, but have had several over the years.

In March of 2016 I bought my dream bike; an '01 Honda Blackbird (CBR1100XX). Planned to ride many miles on it, but after spending way too much money on extra pieces, simply couldn't make it comfortable. I mean, 140mph in 3rd gear, with 3 gears left, is nothing to sneeze at; but riding more than 2 tanks of gas in a row was impossible. So, not so much of a dream bike after all.

So I sold it about 3 weeks ago and bought an '04 V-Strom 1000 with 60k miles and a bunch of farkles.

The ride home from picking it up was all freeway, following my wife and daughter (they were in the minivan :-) ), and was as long as the longest trip I was ever able to make on my Blackbird...and *way* more comfortable! Lots of ways to stretch out, and I figured out I could stand straight up on the Strom at freeway speeds; I'm pretty much eye-level with the semi drivers. Their faces are priceless when they see me! :-) It was only about 2 hours; but by the end my brain was numb and I wasn't trackin' too well because of the turbulence. Thankfully I have an adjustable screen and have since moved it around many times. I'm getting it closer and the buffetting has been reduced a lot. But it's still there; next thing I'm going to try is moving the mirrors.

Took it on my first "longer" ride (3 hours) and ended up having to bump-start it twice; turned out to be a battery with shorted cells. After replacing the battery I checked voltages and discovered that I had another charging issue. I dug into it, and sure enough, the magnets had moved. And then I broke one!! :-( So now I'm desperately looking for a replacement magnet. If you have an extra one laying around, I'd *love* to buy it from you!

Here's a pic of the bike on my first long-ish ride: 308 miles, 6 hours, and fun the entire way! Still working on taming the buffetting, as the last hour was pretty miserable. But compared to my Blackbird (or any other bike I've owned, actually), this thing is like riding a couch, *and* every dirt road I passed I waned to drive down it! Since I was solo I didn't, but have 2 friends with v-stroms and we're going to go play as soon as I get a new magnet and jb weld them all in place!

Welcome!  Very interesting story, thanks for sharing.

Your picture didn't show up. You might need to add ?.jpg to make it work. You have to jump through some hoops to make pictures hosted on Google Photos work.

Thanks Bill! The picture should be viewable now.